“Turning a Man’s Life Right Around”: Wallace’s Rehabilitation of Frederick Exley in IJ
Bibliographic record
Abstract
novel's opening section set at an unspecified time after the rest of novel's action --an epilogue given in a flashback in a prolog that takes place after the events to be narrated in the novel -when he fleetingly alludes to their meeting, along with the Canadian John Wayne, at the grave of Hal's father.That this meeting restages the graveyard scene in Hamlet, from which the novel derives its very title, while the grave is that of James Orin Incandenza, or JOI, the promethean auteur who embodies the novel's parody/homage to Joyce, suggests the thoroughness with which Ulysses and Hamlet are entwined in Wallace's novel.For all that in his portrayal of Gately Wallace carries out an ambitious, audacious reworking of Joyce, that portrayal, as I will demonstrate in what follows, draws upon yet another intertext: A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley.The largely forgotten Exley might on the face of it seem like an unlikely author for Wallace to pair with Joyce in the creation of a character so important to his project. 2Yet Wallace's use of Exley in the fashioning of his Joycean Everyman is not only an example of his procedure, a fundamental imperative of Wallace's poetics, of combining and layering his intertexts, but also of the radical conception of intertextuality in which he imitated not only Joyce's work, but the very process, the working method, by which Joyce brought that work into being. 3 Just as Joyce based the portrayal of Bloom on his friend, the Italian novelist, Italo Svevo, author of the seminal modernist work, The Conscience of Zeno, Wallace, following the same path, draws on the biographical details of a contemporary novelist for his portrayal of Gately.* The big difference is that whereas Joyce drew upon direct knowledge of his actual friend to form his fictional character, there is no evidence that
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".